load of tosh : InfiniteHoops.com

Looking for .NET Forum Control

Tosh Meston — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:07:00 GMT

I think thinking about incorporating forums into my pickup sports sites - InfiniteHoops.com and InfiniteSoccer.com - and although I am tempted to write my own forum code, the fact is I have so little time and this is something I think there are several implementations in .NET already. Anybody using a .NET forum control or app that they like and would recommend? Let me know. Thanks. - T -

Testing Scoble's Link Power

Tosh Meston — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 07:50:00 GMT

Rob Scoble claims to raise sites from obscurity to a Google rank of 4 with a simple link from his blog. Let's try it out. I have a site (InfiniteSoccer.com) that has been up one month and currently has a rank of 0. Let's see if it works. I'll report back in a few weeks.

Announcing InfiniteSoccer.com

Tosh Meston — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 19:47:00 GMT

Today I announce InfiniteSoccer.com, a site for finding and scheduling pick-up soccer games based on the impressive technology that powers InfiniteHoops.com. Very exciting to think that a new franchise is the simple act of creating a new CSS, changing a few strings in the RESX, and setting an option in the web.config.

So what is it?

InfiniteSoccer.com is a place to find pick-up soccer games worldwide. If you are looking for a regular game to play in, check out our search. If you have a regular game and are looking for people, schedule it here so players can find it.

It’s free.

InfiniteHoops.com Milestone 100

Tosh Meston — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 21:00:00 GMT

My little .NET project InfiniteHoops.com for finding and scheduling basketball games reached 100 registered players on Saturday, I am pleased to say. Development in recent weeks has been mostly in the area of UI and ease of use improvements. I have also started my link exchange campaign starting with NBA webloggers. This seems to be driving the new users and has boosted my Google rank to 4. I can also find my site now on the 19th page of a “pickup basketball” Google search. Still terrible, but before the link exchange I couldn't find it in the top 50 pages. Sadly, this blog is listed on page 8 of the same search. I have also added a nightly NBA scores control to the site which uses WebRequest and Regex. I also make good use of output caching as to be a good internet citizen and not annoy my data source. The Google ads are generating some money, but not too much. I think that could be improved by displaying a variety of ads. As it happens I am seeing the same ones repeated quite frequently.

In short, the growth is slow, but it's there.

SportsML

Tosh Meston — Wed, 03 Dec 2003 00:56:00 GMT

I am kind of interested in applications of XML. To be sure, it was an interest in RSS which led me to write my random thoughts about things on this blog. Recently, I blogged an update about the MathML spec. I have heard of projects such as ChemML (CML) to markup molecular structure and reaction formulas, and a similar effort is in progress to markup music. Last night, I came across another effort by way of the cool Google ads on my pickup basketball site InfiniteHoops.com (shameless plug, I know and don't care) -- SportsML, which aims to provide a method to markup stats and scores from all sporting events. A SportsML feed of up to the minute pro sports stats is something which naturally would be a good fit for my particular situation and all the would-be ESPNs around the web. If those SportsML guys are reading this, no doubt the next step is a SOAP based SportsAPI for stat keeping. Perhaps in my next life I will have time to work on this.

InfiniteHoops.com and Google AdSense

Tosh Meston — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 08:42:00 GMT

I decided to sign up for Google AdSense and start serving content specific ads (in this case basketball specific) on my InfiniteHoops.com pickup basketball site. The Google team first reviewed the site and suggested that I push more content outside of my login before they would agree to serve ads. Having more functionality for unauth'd users is feedback I had received earlier from members of this community in fact. Anyhow, after making some site reorganization and additional functionality, I resubmitted the URL and they reviewed and agreed to serve ads.

I decided on Google ads as they are the least intrusive. No images, no flash, no popup garbage. Just simple text that might appeal to my users. Anyhow, one gets to choose the size and colors of the ad banners and then it's a simple matter of pasting their markup into your site. I put their markup into a User Control so that I could include a simple tag on multiple pages.

So now it is business as usual. Find ways to grow my user base on a limited budget, i.e., zip.

InfiniteHoops.com -- the first month

Tosh Meston — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 20:35:00 GMT

My .NET authored site for pickup basketball has been up for just over five weeks now. I have signed up 76 users and this number seems to have really plateau'd out. I have added such features as RSS feed of the NBA news that I find interesting (which no one uses -- seriously), RSS on the individual team pages (which one person uses), and comments on new items (which 3 people have used). Most of my user-agents are IE 6 and Windows. There have been 3 users hitting it with Firebird, 1 IE on Mac. I see a lot of requests for cmd.exe which I attribute to Code Red still out in the wild. I see a number of spiders including: MSNBot, GoogleBot, Scooter, Slurp... No doubt they are coming from weblogs.asp.net as I think this blog is the only site to link to InfiniteHoops.com.

So, how do I grow my users? Do I continue to add portal type features like voting? Add some sort of social networking like Friendster (there are 14,000 ballers in your network)? I am thinking of having a “Link to me, I'll link to you“ promotion to raise my Google rank. Currently, if I search for “pickup basketball“, I can't find my site in the first 50 pages. Terrible.

On another sad note, my trusty dev machine (Inspiron 8100) is suffering from a failing hard drive. All my data is off of it and I am keeping a death watch on the poor guy. Not sure if I will buy a new drive or just work on a new machine as the Inspiron is getting old.

Anyhow, I have a game now so I must go.

InfiniteHoops.com -- the first week

Tosh Meston — Mon, 13 Oct 2003 06:24:00 GMT

My pick-up games and all things basketball web site - InfiniteHoops.com - has been up for just over a week now and I thought I would give a quick report on it. In seven days time, I had signed up 55 unique logins or “players”, which I think is not too bad, but the majority of those people are guys I have played ball with in the past and the logins are the result of me harassing these guys to use the site to tell people if they are going to show up to hoops or not. There are about 10 people I would say are completely unknown to me so the “word of mouth” factor of growing the number of users is there, and I am curious how effective it will be over time. There are currently 2 teams or groups of ballers that I personally did not create, so that is great.

I realized this week based on studying the usage data that people are really hitting my site only the on the day of a game and I wanted to keep them coming back all the time like any good portal operator. So, I whipped up a news feature on the main and login pages where you can get basketball headlines and submit those you find interesting. I am letting anyone submit stories for now until somebody forces me to put in an approval mechanism. The TODO list includes adding comments to the news, adding RSS and investigating adding support for aggregators using CommentAPI. I am pushing new builds almost every night as I complete features (usually in a couple hours in the late evenings). Incidentally, I do expose an RSS feed on the messages associated with each “team“.

The performance from my state of the art web hosting, meaning my running a server with MSDE on a 1 proc 2.4 ghz machine with basically no ram, over cable modem (yes, a dynamic IP as well) has been better than I expected. The only downtime occured as a result of a really windy day today which knocked out power for a bit and actually dropped a large fir tree on my house. Fortunately, the damage to the “data center” seems minimal.

So on to week two of my little project, I am curious to see to hear if anyone has suggestions for growing your user base with $0 for advertising.

InfiniteHoops.com

Tosh Meston — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 00:51:00 GMT

Today I announce my .NET authored site InfiniteHoops.com, which is a kind of sports scheduling engine. It took a while to get all the pieces together to host this thing myself. Pulled together new hardware, new code, domain, dns. Now there's a Dell PowerEdge in my library running Windows Server 2003 and MSDE 2000. Hopefully, I will need to upgrade soon to full-blown SQL Server if the players come.

Namespaces of note (as if you couldn't guess)... System.Data.SqlClient, System.Web, System.Web.Mail and InfiniteHoops.Engine

Features of note... create teams, schedule single or recurring games, search for teams, forms based authentication and trash-talk module (complete with RSS feed).

Anyone looking for pickup basketball games in the Redmond area, find my team at the Pro Club on Tuesdays and Fridays. Or create your own team and schedule some games in your area.